SAN FRANCISCO —
Synopsys Inc. said Tuesday (July 12) that its Galaxy
design platform and design-for-manufacturing (DFM)
tool suite support the entire Open Artwork System
Interchange Standard (Oasis) file transfer format with
all current production releases.
Synopsys said all
its relevant software, including Astro, IC Compiler,
CATS, Hercules, Proteus, SiVL and Star-RCXT now
support Oasis.
Oasis,
developed by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials
International (SEMI)'s datapath task force in 2003,
is billed as a replacement for the semiconductor
industry's GDSII file format. It claims to be 10 to 50
times more compact and more efficiently able to
represent flat data than its predecessor.
Tom Grebinski, who
led the SEMI datapath task force development and is
now president and CEO of Oasis Tooling, said in a
statement issued by Synopsys Tuesday that the industry
is at a key transition point where GDSII can no longer
adequately represent geometric design and mask layout
data.
"High-performance,
Oasis-compliant and interoperable MDP tools, such as
those introduced here by Synopsys, become critical and
timely for the replacement of GDSII tools," Grebinski
said.
Synopsys was an
early participant in the task force that defined and
developed GDSII.
